Cutting the 9 mm plywood went okay. It was about half done when I noticed that the cutter was starting to leave fuzzy/lumpy sidewalls on the cuts, but only on the second pass, so I'm guessing I was using the wrong feed or speed. The up/down-cutting 1/8" tool looked discolored good out toward the tip - overheated? Spindle speed was 16,000 rpm, which doesn't sound out of line. As for cleaning up the messy cut, VCarve Desktop doesn't have a "finish pass" feature, and while it can be faked, I wondered if rerunning the job with a new cutter would work. Other than the extra time, it worked well, but it's a reminder that I can't ignore feeds and speeds - yes I know better.
Oh, and I learned a tip about using painters tape and super glue. I didn't see a need to cover the entire panel with tape, so used only four stripes. Yeah well, that was all fine, until it was cutting parts between those stripes. It was nearing the end of cutting a small gear when I realized I better turn off the vacuum in case it broke free... too late, and with a "Thump" it disappeared down the vacuum hose, hah. That was fun because the vacuum has a bag, which had to be torn open to find the one valuable piece of "waste." Good times.
Somewhat related, I work on a project until I get tired of it, then switch to something different. Such was the case with the router, switching over to the belt sander to take a break. This is mentioned because there are several things that haven't been aligned on the router, ("how far off could it be?"). Well after cutting out all the clock parts, I decided on a whim to finally surface the waste board. When done, it was shocking to see a sawtooth pattern on the waste board that I could easily catch my fingernail on, which meant that the spindle wasn't oriented vertically. The mill tramming indicator confirmed that the spindle is leaning forward by about 1.5 mm over a distance of about 20 mm. For the clock, I'll "probably" get away with the misalignment because the cut spans are short enough that the cuts "probably" haven't exceeded tolerances. I think the easiest way is to shim the spindle mount itself. In addition to being off front-to-back, it's also off side-to-side, just to make things more fun.
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